On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 09:55:37AM +1300, Glynn Foster wrote: > But there's absolutely no consistency with that. There's no > guidelines or best practices of how to apply the membership. If one > community's interpretation of the process is easier for geting 'Core > Contributor' status compared to another community's process, then > you're potentially going to get a weighted community. No one wants > that, it'll only lead to bitterness among the wider community.
Yes, that's a valid concern, and in fact I noticed very early on that we had this problem already. As of the last publication, the communities have core contributor representation as follows: 4 academic 1 approach 9 arc 4 brandz 9 cab 9 desktop 5 documentation 4 dtrace 6 fm 5 i18n 2 immigrants 10 install 11 laptop 6 marketing 5 mdb 8 network 3 nfs 48 on 9 performance 4 ppc 5 smf 9 testing 23 tools 105 usergroup 3 x 15 zfs 6 zones That is, almost 1/3 of all core contributors represent the user groups, and another 15% are the ON CRT. Surely, you'd think, user groups aren't the single most important activity we have going, more than twice as important as anything else. In truth, the problem we have today is not that some communities have made it too easy to obtain core contributorship, or even that there is no consistent guideline for awarding it. Simply put, the largest problem is that some communities have done a good job of identifying contributors and others have not. A secondary problem is that some communities (without regard for their relative value) simply don't have very many contributors. In the long run, this suggests that per-Community representation may someday be needed a la the United States Senate. In the short run, it suggests that some communities are poorly organised and led, and those communities will be the ones who are left without a voice, leaving interested parties to petition for replacement or dissolution of those ineffective communities. Until we have a sensible set of communities with clear and effective leadership, I see little reason for the OGB to issue guidelines in an effort to prevent communities from granting core contributorship too easily. That problem will be better addressed after community reorganisation. > While I can appreciate how it on a local level within the various > OpenSolaris sub-communities, so that you build up a web of trust > when technical issues need to be tackled, I'm still really > struggling how it fits with the wider global OpenSolaris Likewise. A lot of this depends on exactly what role the OGB will claim for itself. The proposed Constitution gives vast, dare I say unconscionable, power to the OGB and to my way of thinking relies far too much on the goodness of its members and the vigilance of the electorate to ensure proper use of that power (rather than placing stricter limits on the OGB but giving its members greater independence to act within those limits). The requirement for such widespread and intimate participation in government may well turn out to be a serious handicap in a community in which many or most participants would rather engineer software, especially if such an unbalanced situation arises. That's doubly true given that, so far, the balance of power is firmly against those who "just want to write code." If this situation persists, the OGB may need to consider structural changes to the Constitution, assuming it's ratified. What shape those changes might take would depend on the nature of the imbalance and the rulemaking areas into which the OGB chooses to wade. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
